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Thursday, June 07, 2012

UC-enabled "Multimodal Customer Experiences"

A recent analysis of contact center applications moving into the "cloud" showed that IVR (self-service) applications was the application that was most frequently shifted off premise to a "cloud" based service. This highlights how customers will be accommodated with more flexible self-service options as they start using multimodal smart phones and tablets, rather than traditional voice-only telephones.

As I suggested in a previous post,
mobile customers will now require an integration of various customer
service experiences. It will be a combination of how self-service
interfaces are designed for smartphones and tablets, as well as how live
assistance is accessed and supported when needed. It also includes
proactive, outbound “notifications” and alerts to mobile customers from
automated business process applications, and what response options can
be given to the mobile recipient.

Old call center options for live
assistance will remain for customers who continue to
call from voice only telephones. However, even, there, if the customers has ever
interacted online, there will be more contextual “intelligence” for
efficient call handling. However, as more and more consumers adopt
multimodal smartphones and tablets for personalized mobile contacts,
“cloud”-based, UC-enabled contact centers will play an increasing role
in seamlessly integrating all customer interactions. This trend will
impact how organizations must support new “customer experience” needs as
discussed in this video interview.

So,
when you talk about insuring customer satisfaction and loyalty, it will
be a combination of their experience with any or all of the above. The
challenge for business organizations of any size, will be to optimize
those different customer experiences, so that all of them will be
positive for the customer.

What Customers Really Need

Live customer assistance is needed when customers can’t get what they want on their own,
whether it is information, authorization, help with a problem, or to
perform some kind of transaction. The main point is that if they can do
it easily themselves, they won’t need live assistance. On the other
hand, if a self-service application is not user friendly or too time
consuming, the customer will jump to live customer assistance.

If, for
whatever reason, the customer does need such live assistance, they will typically
want such access immediately. That is not to say such access is
necessarily a real time connection (chat, voice, video), because often
there is no need to have the answer immediately. This will be
particularly true when there is a known need for research into the
problem or authorizations must be done before the results can be given.
In such situations, the customer, as the contact initiator, may well
choose to send a message, voice or text, and get confirmation that the
message has been received. It might also be useful to let the customer
know when a response may be forthcoming.

When it comes to real-time live assistance, customers won’t appreciate any of the following:

Being put into a waiting queue with no indication of how long that might take

Being
connected to someone who doesn’t who you are and what you have already
done online and requires a repeat identification procedures

Being connected to someone who can’t answer their needs

Being transferred from one person to another; conferencing is a more “seamless” mode of involving other expertise

Speaking with an agent that doesn’t speak their language very well

So,
to avoid any of the above problems that can arise because of staffing
issues, it will make sense to allow customers to exploit well-designed
self-service applications that can now be offered to mobile devices.
Fortunately, multimodal mobile devices will facilitate this approach to
customer services by starting with customer access to information and
notifications and then allowing “contextual” contacts with live
assistance.

Customer Assistance Is A Two-way Street

Live
assistance can also exploit access to self-services. That is, even
though the mobile or online customer may be talking to a live customer
service person, it will be simple for the agent to transfer the customer
to an appropriate self-service application, along with any contextual
data needed by the application. This can include access to “mobile apps”
that will be highly focused on specific customer-related applications.

Many
years ago when I spoke at a conference about IVR self-services, I
suggested that when a customer transfers to live assistance, the agent
should similarly transfer the customer to an appropriate IVR application
when the rest of the customer’s needs can be done by themselves.
Someone in the audience asked me who provides that capability, and I had
to say “No one yet!”

Today, with multimodal smartphones and
cloud-based applications, there is no limit to how self-services
integrated with live assistance can optimize customer support needs. The
trick to cost efficient customer service will be to maximize all forms
of self-services, but retain customer options for live assistance.